“So he is!” nodded the grandmother; a change overspread her entire face now, she looked tender, grandmotherly, half-hopeful, as if for the moment trouble on behalf of her ne’er-do-well son was forgotten. “Well! perhaps I will move there before the winter sets in hard, Leon. I’m not so smart as I was. I’m sure I don’t know how to thank you! Good-night!”
“Good-night!” returned the scout. “You can untie those shutters easily enough in the morning.”
And he found himself outside again upon the dark marshland, with the obedient terrier who had trotted at his heels during the late proceedings, waltzing excitedly at his side.
“Ah, la! la! as Toiney says, it’s too late now, Blink, for us to put back to the town to buy our supper—half a pound of beefsteak and two potatoes, to be cooked over each one’s special fire,” muttered the boy, momentarily irresolute. “Well! we’ll have to let the grub go, and race back across the uplands, over to the Hollow. Stir your trotters, Mr. Dog!”
As the two regained the crest of the hilly uplands, Leon paused for breath. On his left hand stretched the dark, solemn woods, where the breeze hooted weirdly among leafless boughs. On his right, beyond upland and broad salt-marsh, wound the silver-spot river in whose now shallow ripples bathed a rising moon.
Quarter of a mile ahead of him a rosy flush upon the cheek of darkness told that in the sheltered hollow, between a clump of pines that served as a windbreak and the woods, the Owls’ camp-fires were already blazing.
“Tooraloo! I feel as if I could start my fire to-night without using a match at all—just by snapping my fingers at it, or with a piece of damp bark and a snowball, as the woodsmen say,” he confided half-audibly to the dog.
Whence this feeling of prowess, of being a firebrand—a genial one—capable of kindling other and better lights in the world than a camp-fire?
Starrie Chase did not analyze his sensations of magnificence, which bloomed from a discovery back there on the marshes of the secret which is at the root of the Boy Scout Movement, at the base of all Christian Chivalry, at the foundation of golden labor for mankind in every age: namely, that the excitement of helping people is vastly, vitally, and blissfully greater than the spurious excitement of hurting them!